Polymerization is presently a widely utilized process in chemistry and consists essentially of the formation of long sequences of smaller structural units held together by covalent bonds to form large chains or macromolecules. The repeat unit of these large molecules are called monomers or monomer residue--S because atoms are eliminated from the simple monomeric unit during some polymerization processes to provide for the necessary bonding sites through which each can be linked to other monomers to form the polymer chain. The breaking and making of new bonds over a long chain is then the building process of polymers or simply to convert monomer molecules into a polymer.
Special cases of polymerization are the co-polymers and terpolymers and form quite a large family of polymers.
Although each type of polymer goes through a slightly different process, the fundamental process remains the breaking and making of bonds. Thus, if an autoclave or any device is expected to improve polymerization it needs to break and make bonds. Generally a controlled autoclave utilizes the combined interaction of temperature, pressure and in some cases catalysts.
As however the family of polymers increased the ranges of presently used temperature pressure and catalysts did not further serve all the needed polymerization ranges and an extension of operating ranges become needed. According to this invention, of the three variable parameters, manipulation of pressure was determined to be the basic mode of polymerization. In this regard, ultrasonic energy has been previously proposed for enhancing the process of polymerization. It is however well known in such devices and processes that cavitation strongly limits the possible energy transfer of ultrasonic energy to the process constituents. Another limiting factor is that with present technology, appropriate ultrasonic generators have not been developed.
The object of the present invention is to provide a novel method and apparatus for carrying out the polymerization process.
In order to overcome the shortcomings noted above, the present invention introduces a piezoelectric shock device enabling the application of much higher energies (orders of magnitude higher) for breaking and enhancing bonds of the constituent monomeric units as the polymeric chains are formed.